The history of witchcraft

In the spring of 1662, a Scottish woman named Isobel Gowdie sat in the parish church of Auldearn and confessed. She told her interrogators that she had flown over the countryside on a straw, that she had turned into a hare and a cat, and that her coven met at night in abandoned houses to feast on stolen meat. Her confession, extracted over weeks of questioning, became one of the most detailed descriptions of witchcraft ever recorded. It was also a fiction – a blend of local folklore, Protestant demonology, and a woman trying to tell her tormentors what they wanted to hear. The history of witchcraft is the history of that gap: between what people actually did and what they were accused of, between folk healing and heresy, between rural magic and state terror. It begins long before Gowdie and continues after the last execution, reshaping itself in every century.

We are Le Grand Grimoire, keepers of a reference library where the occult is not romanticized and not dismissed. This article tracks the historical arc of witchcraft from its ancient roots to its modern revival, with dated facts, primary texts, and a steady eye on what the sources actually say.

Where does the word “witchcraft” come from?

The English word witch descends from Old English wicca (masculine) and wicce (feminine), likely related to Proto-Germanic wikkōną – to practice sorcery. By the time of the Anglo-Saxon laws (c. 690 AD), King Æthelberht’s code already penalized “witchcraft” alongside murder. But the concept is far older. In ancient Mesopotamia, the šiptu (incantation) and kaššāpu (sorcerer) appear in Sumerian tablets from the second millennium BCE. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE) prescribes the river ordeal for anyone accused of sorcery: if the accused drowned, the accuser took the house. That same logic – the trial by water – would return thirteen centuries later in early modern Europe. The continuity is not direct but structural. The fear of magic that harms, the figure who works it, and the social need to punish her: these are older than any single tradition.

How folk healing became heresy: the medieval turning point

In medieval Europe, most village healers – cunning folk, wise women, white witches – operated openly. They knew the charm against elf-shot, the herbal poultice for fever, and how to recover stolen goods with a sieve and a pair of shears. The Church tolerated them as long as they used Christian prayers. The penitentials (books of penance, c. 700–1000 AD) prescribed mild fasts for practicing “divinations and incantations”, not burning.

What changed this was the theology of diabolic pact. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas argued that all magic, even seemingly beneficial, required a demonic intermediary. By the 14th century, the Inquisition began to treat harmful magic (maleficia) as heresy. The definitive text came in 1486: the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) by Heinrich Kramer. Kramer claimed that witches copulated with demons, flew to sabbaths, and stole penises in birds’ nests. The Malleus was not a neutral manual – it was personal vendetta from a frustrated inquisitor. But the printing press made it Europe’s bestseller after the Bible.

The human consequence was terrifying. Between 1450 and 1750, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe and colonial America. The majority were women, often elderly or widowed. A single accusation could destroy an entire family: in the Trier witch trials (1581–1593), 368 people were burned, including a burgomaster and his wife. The trials followed a predictable pattern: denunciations under torture, the accused’s “confession” conforming to the judges’ expectation, and a final execution that confirmed the judges’ worldview.

The symbolism of the witch: from hag to rebel

Before the 15th century, the witch was not a distinct visual type. The iconography emerged from the demonologists: the broom (a common household item used to apply flying ointment), the black cat (the theologians’ favorite shape for a demonic familiar), the cauldron (home brewer’s tool turned into a vessel for magical poison). Each object had a mundane origin that was re-read as occult.

The image of the witch in early modern propaganda served a clear function: to justify the persecution of those who threatened social order. But from the 19th century onward, beginning with Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière (1862), the witch was reclaimed as symbol of feminine rebellion, pre-Christian wisdom, and resistance to patriarchy. Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) argued that the witch trials actually persecuted a surviving pagan religion – a thesis largely rejected by historians but powerful in shaping modern neopaganism.

Practices: what the accused actually did, and what they did not

The confessions describe sabbaths with elaborate feasts, dancing back-to-back, and kissing the devil’s anus (osculum infame). None of it happened. But that does not mean no one practiced magic.

Real folk magic in early modern Europe included:

• Preparing a charm bag of dried frog, bat wing, and grave dust to heal a cow.
• Reciting the “Seventh Book of Moses” (a 19th-century grimoire) over a candle.
• Cutting an apple crosswise to reveal a five-pointed star for a love spell.
• Burying an earthenware bottle filled with needles and urine to curse an enemy – the “witch bottle” archaeology has dug up dozens of examples.

These practices continued long after the trials ended. In England, the 1736 Witchcraft Act replaced the earlier 1604 act; it decriminalized harm-witchcraft but maintained a small fine for “pretending” to practice witchcraft. Cunning folk operated openly in many regions until the early 20th century.

Comparisons: historical witchcraft vs. modern Wicca

The most persistent confusion in modern discourse is between witchcraft as a historical accusation and Wicca as a modern religion. Gerald Gardner, a British civil servant and amateur anthropologist, claimed in Witchcraft Today (1954) that he had been initiated into a surviving coven of the “old religion.” He synthesized ceremonial magic, folk practices, and initiation structures into what became Gardnerian Wicca. The claim of ancient lineage is not supported by evidence. Wicca is a 20th-century creation, drawing on Charles Leland’s Aradia (1899), Margaret Murray’s books, and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

That does not make it invalid. But a historian must separate the persecuted figure of the early modern witch from the modern Wiccan dedicated to the god and goddess. The two share only the word “witchcraft” – and even that, in modern orthography, was reconstructed.

What people get wrong about the history of witchcraft

• “Witches were pagan.” Most accused witches were Christians, often devout ones who confessed under duress to practices they believed were real.
• “Nine million were killed.” The source of this number is a 1791 speech by the radical Matilda Joslyn Gage, later popularized by radical feminists. The consensus among historians is 40,000–60,000.
• “The burning times were a genocide of women.” The executions were gendered but not genocidal; the cause was theological, not demographic.
• “Witches really flew.” Flying ointments containing belladonna or hemlock could produce the sensation of flight, but no broom was ever used for transport in folk practice.

FAQ

Was witchcraft actually practiced secretly in medieval Europe? Yes, in the sense that cunning folk and healers operated openly within Christian frameworks. Secret covens dedicated to a pagan god are a modern myth.

When did the witch trials begin and end? The peak in Europe was 1580–1650. The last legal execution for witchcraft in Europe was of Anna Göldi in Switzerland in 1782. The Salem trials occurred in 1692.

Is Wicca the same as historical witchcraft? No. Wicca is a 20th-century religious reconstruction. Historical witchcraft is a legal and theological category applied to accused individuals.

The history is not finished

The fire is not out. Witchcraft continues to be redefined: in neopagan traditions, in feminist spirituality, in pop culture as rebellion. We live in a century that can hold both the archive of the trials and the living practice of modern witchery. The difference requires memory.

For the scholar and the practitioner alike, the next step is to read the primary sources: the trial records, the grimoires, the folk charms. Start with the Malleus Maleficarum – but read it as a text of its time, not a manual of truth. Then compare it with a modern Wiccan Book of Shadows. The gap between them is the history itself.

Discover more about the arc of magical thought in our guide to occult history. Understand the figure of the cunning woman in our glossary entry on cunning folk. For the context of the witch trials themselves, see our analysis of the early modern witch hunts.